Founded in 2001, Wikipedia has turned into a mammoth of information, news and resources, becoming the largest encyclopedia ever assembled with over 10 million articles already published. A plus factor that Wikipedia has, that keeps it above any other informational resource is the freedom to edit the content. Anybody can edit and make pages and the changes are reflected immediately. Though this has its own flaws and unreliability issues, it’s not much of a problem and incorrect information is usually always corrected by other users.
Considering most of the popular topics make their way to Wikipedia, it is interesting to see how they rank and which is one is more popular than the other. Apparently, the Wikimedia Foundation makes their usage data public and is available to everyone. Backed up by that data, these 3 tools bring you the most viewed and the most popular pages on Wikipedia.
Wikirank
Wikirank tells you what are the most popular pages on Wikipedia by their number of page views. On its homepage, you can find the top contenders and also see the trending articles for that day with a percentage of how much they hiked. Via the search feature (which autocompletes your queries) you can search for any article that is present in the Wikipedia repository and view its stats in an easy to analyze chart which highlights page views for each day. The chart can be viewed in a time span of a month, two months or three months. You can embed charts on other web pages and compare different topics as well.
Wikirage
Unlike Wikirank which rates pages according to the page views they have, Wikirage ranks pages by the number of page edits they have had. You can see which pages have been edited the most in the last hour, 6 hours, day, 3 days, a week or a month. Popular people in the news, latest fads and everything hot bubbles to the top of the list. Right now, Susan Boyle’s page is the most edited for this month.
Stats.Grok.Se
This service that although bears a weird name, works as it’s expected too. Quite identical to Wikirank (minus the looks), this one lets you browse the stats of different Wikipedia pages for any particular month (since ’08/1). You can also browse stats for the different language versions of Wikipedia and there’s one Top list too where you can go through all the top viewed pages.
And that’s all. Let us know what you think about these tools in the comments. And we appreciate if you could spread the word about this article, through a stumble or tweet 🙂
